Good way to check if Kafka Consumer doesn't have any records to return and is empty in java?

I'm using Apache KafkaConsumer. I want to check if the consumer has any messages to return without polling. If I poll the consumer and there aren't any messages, then I get the message "Attempt to heartbeat failed since the group is rebalancing" in an infinite loop until the timeout expires, even though I have a records.isEmpty() clause. This is a snippet of my code:

ConsumerRecords<String, String> records = consumer.poll(Duration.ofSeconds(10));
if (records.isEmpty()) {
      log.info("No More Records");
      consumer.close();
    }
else {
      records.iterator().forEachRemaining(record -> log.info("RECORD: " + record);
);

This works fine until records are empty. Once it is empty, it logs "Attempt to heartbeat failed since the group is rebalancing" many times, logs "No More Records" once, and then continues to log the heartbeat error. What can I do to combat this and how can I elegantly check (without any heartbeat messages) that there are no more records to poll?

Edit: I asked another question and the full code and context is on this link: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64328346/how-to-get-messages-from-kafka-consumer-one-by-one-in-java/

Thanks in advance!

> Out of comment: "Since I have a UI and want to receive a message one by one by clicking the "receive" button, there might be a case when there are no more messages to be polled."

In that case you need to create a new KafkaConsumer every time someone clicks on the "receive" button and then close it afterwards.

If you want to use the same KafkaConsumer for the lifetime of your client, you need to let the broker know that it is still alive (by sending a heartbeat, which is implicitly done through calling the poll method). Otherwise, as you have already experienced, the broker thinks your KafkaConsumer is dead and will initiate a rebalancing. As there is no other active Consumer available this rebalancing will not stop.